Race

Tutor: Lydia Plath

In this session we will explore the lives of black women and their experiences of sexual violence in the United States using an intersectional approach. We will discuss the theoretical and methodological challenges faced by historians seeking to understand the history of sexual violence endured by black women, and we will explore the extent to which enslaved black women were able to bodily resist such oppressions in the antebellum US South.

Seminar questions:

1. Why is an “intersectional” approach necessary to understand the oppression and lived experiences of black women?

2. What are the methodological challenges faced by historians writing about black women and their experiences of sexual violence?

3. To what extent were enslaved women able to use their bodies to resist their oppression?

Wilma King, “‘Prematurely Knowing of Evil Things’: The Sexual Abuse of African American Girls and Young Women in Slavery and Freedom”, Journal of African American History, 99:3 (2014), pp. 173-196. https://0-www-jstor-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/stable/10.5323/jafriamerhist.99.3.0173

Emily West, “Reflections on the History and Historians of the black woman’s role in the community of slaves: enslaved women and intimate partner sexual violence”, American Nineteenth Century History, 19:1 (2018): pp. 1-21. https://0-www-tandfonline-com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/doi/abs/10.1080/14664658.2018.1429333

Hull Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (eds), All the women are White, all the Blacks are men, but some of us are brave: Black women's studies (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982).

Jacobs, Harriet, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. (Boston: 1861).

Livesey, Andrea, “Conceived in Violence: Enslaved Mothers and Children Born of Rape in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana,” Slavery and Abolition 38:2 (2017), pp. 373–391.

McGuire, Danielle L., At the dark end of the street: black women, rape, and resistance—a new history of the civil rights movement from Rosa Parks to the rise of black power (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).

Morgan, Jennifer, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

Painter, Nell Irvin, Southern History Across the Color Line (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

Rosen, Hannah, Terror in the heart of freedom: Citizenship, sexual violence, and the meaning of race in the postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

Sommerville, Diane Miller, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta (ed.), How we get free: black feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).